Broadcom execs say VMware price, subscription complaints are unwarranted
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
And their solution to this problem was to piss off their existing customers and make them bother to evaluate the other options?
Upvote
28
(28
/
0)
VMWARE shouldn't be allowed to bundle so many products. They are abusing their position; time to get the EU regulators on them. sic'em boy! go get'em ruff, ruff, ruff.
Upvote
13
(16
/
-3)
I don't think Broadcom really cares about those customers. They want large enterprise, and appear to be OK with giving up small business marketshare.
Upvote
34
(34
/
0)
Upvote
32
(32
/
0)
Sadly it worked for Netflix and their password crackdown. Everyone said it was going to be the end of them and that people would cut the cord, so to speak. As of late '23 they added 9 million new users.
Upvote
15
(16
/
-1)
Well, if they think their new price point is correct and it's their users who are being unreasonable, they can leave it where it is, and watch their user base switch to Proxmox.
Upvote
9
(10
/
-1)
If it really is to our benefit then there's no need to stop offering the old options. Just start offering the new options and since it's clearly better people will just move of their own accord. If people aren't switching on their own then obviously it's not really as good a deal is you are trying to make it out to be.
Upvote
27
(27
/
0)
Oddly, a lot of companies won't have diamond hands come the day they see the renewal quote..
Upvote
15
(15
/
0)
Everyone I know is moving off as fast as they can.
Golden egg laying goose has been dispatched.
Golden egg laying goose has been dispatched.
Upvote
23
(23
/
0)
Realistically if they had only when raised the price by ~1.5x when they switched to subscriptions they probably would have got away with it. Yes, a lot of people would have complained loudly, but then in the end shrugged their shoulders and continued on business as usual. Instead the 3x - 10x cost increase (my company was just under 3x) is completely steamrolling their entire trust with their user base. We're in the process of evaluating alternatives, and the goal is to be completely off by renewal time early next year. Not sure we'll make it but our footprint will be WAY smaller by then. I knew Broadcom would ruin VMware, but this is beyond even what I thought. Good lord.
Upvote
45
(45
/
0)
One of the companies I do some consulting for on the side is a ESXi shop. Currently on 7.0.3. They are trying to move to 8. And guess what happened in January? Thats right license expired, and license updates. We had been spending about 27 thousand dollars a year on licensing. The SAME EXACT count of vSphere and vCenter, same number of cores etc, the price increase FOUR and a HALF times what it was in 2022. Yes, four and a half times.
I won't even get into CPU support changes between 7.0.3 and 8 which in some cases would require new hardware.
We refused to pay this.
While I fully understand that Windows Server 2022 Hyper-V cannot do all that ESXi 8 can do, those upgrades/updates are not worth the more than 3x the cost of Windows Server and Hyper-V. Thankfully there are no real charges to change my Veeam deployment. Alas I do have to deploy Virtual Machine Manager...
I won't even get into CPU support changes between 7.0.3 and 8 which in some cases would require new hardware.
We refused to pay this.
While I fully understand that Windows Server 2022 Hyper-V cannot do all that ESXi 8 can do, those upgrades/updates are not worth the more than 3x the cost of Windows Server and Hyper-V. Thankfully there are no real charges to change my Veeam deployment. Alas I do have to deploy Virtual Machine Manager...
Upvote
42
(43
/
-1)
Sounds like his hinting that in his mind the screw is still a bit loose and there’s room for more price hikes.
Upvote
8
(8
/
0)
I work for a government science operation and on a project with a limit fixed budget. Last week I sat in a meeting with our VMware rep that went over the new pricing model. We would see a 300% increase in price.
They are charging $300 per CPU core now and each physical compute host is a minimum of 16 cores. Our processing load is storage, memory, and network bound, not CPU so we opt for CPUs with less cores and better single threaded performance. We asked over and over again to confirm, an ESXi system with 6/8 cores would still be billed for 16 cores or $4800 per server per year.
They are also bundling EVERYTHING in this new model. We don't use most of them to begin with nor would we.
They were pushing vSAN on us (which has a huge price increase) and then refused to discuss the initial cost of buying and maintaining infrastructure to support a vSAN.
The whole meeting was frustrating and in the Teams chat window we were having sidebars discussing VMware alternatives.
They are charging $300 per CPU core now and each physical compute host is a minimum of 16 cores. Our processing load is storage, memory, and network bound, not CPU so we opt for CPUs with less cores and better single threaded performance. We asked over and over again to confirm, an ESXi system with 6/8 cores would still be billed for 16 cores or $4800 per server per year.
They are also bundling EVERYTHING in this new model. We don't use most of them to begin with nor would we.
They were pushing vSAN on us (which has a huge price increase) and then refused to discuss the initial cost of buying and maintaining infrastructure to support a vSAN.
The whole meeting was frustrating and in the Teams chat window we were having sidebars discussing VMware alternatives.
Upvote
55
(55
/
0)
I work in the networking space and we have seen a shift over time to a subscription model. The way Cisco did this is to introduce a new model with new products. That gave you the opportunity to make a decision if you wanted to stay in the ecosystem.
With the little that I know about virtualization, Broadcom knew that they could not convince clients to move to the new version. Those running older versions would not be incentivized to upgrade. So instead of working to make moving to a new version more appealing, they just decided that all their customers are sheep and changed the whole business model. For our sake, I hope that they don't get away with this.
The way that Adobe introduced creative suite subscriptions is also a good value. They have continued to release a steady stream of new features which make using the product better with every revision. We can argue about the value but they have continued to introduce features that I want to use.
With the little that I know about virtualization, Broadcom knew that they could not convince clients to move to the new version. Those running older versions would not be incentivized to upgrade. So instead of working to make moving to a new version more appealing, they just decided that all their customers are sheep and changed the whole business model. For our sake, I hope that they don't get away with this.
The way that Adobe introduced creative suite subscriptions is also a good value. They have continued to release a steady stream of new features which make using the product better with every revision. We can argue about the value but they have continued to introduce features that I want to use.
Upvote
17
(19
/
-2)
They aren't monopolies, especially not Apple. They don't have majority phone or laptop sales anywhere as far as I know. They are a highly successful company that tries to lock people into their ecosystem, but you'd be bad company (for investors) if you didn't do that.
Now do they exploit the market with their size, wealth and power? Yes, they do.
Also, a lot of the stuff people complain about Apple are actually thing many others do like. I have an iPhone because i know it is locked down so tight I don't have to worry about it. If I want a phone to tinker and play with I'll get an android/other OS phone or device.
Subscriptions though for things that aren't really subscription services are a different thing and a blight on the economy. Subscription for support IMO is ok. Subscription for ownership. Not OK.
Upvote
17
(26
/
-9)
And therein lies the crux of the matter. The initial antitrust probe looked at how things were then, and assumed the status quo would be maintained. Now that it's changing, what was once considered to not be an antitrust violation might well become one. Especially when those non-consensual, unilateral changes were made after the acquisition was approved.
And that also graphically highlights the failures of regulatory bodies across the globe. They only look at what is, and don't place conditions on future changes to prevent monopolistic behaviors.
Failing conditions, just stop approving mergers where such changes are likely to happen.
Upvote
26
(26
/
0)
I can't help but feel like this will tank them in the end, the way Sun's prospects went downhill when they canned OpenSolaris. In the tech industry companies don't provide training, they expect you to come in having already gotten experience with the stuff they use. With no free option you've cut off the supply of new entry-level VMware techs.
Upvote
25
(26
/
-1)
Upvote
-3
(1
/
-4)
That's because in America, corporations are the government and the actual "government" is just some puppet show to make citizen they have power. Companies continue to fuck over Americans but every 4 years people be like "yay i voted". Simpletons.
Upvote
-11
(11
/
-22)
You're right. We need a new word for companies that abuse their market positions, network effect and/or vendor lock-in as though they were monopolists, but technically aren't the only company in that particular business because the internet is so damn big.
Maybe something like "megopolist". In a sentence: Megopolists caused the enshitification of the internet out of corporate greed.
Upvote
-1
(4
/
-5)
Support? Support! What fucking support?!? Your support has been, to put it lightly, a bit of a joke since those goofs at Dell bought VMware. And it doesn’t seem to be getting any better either.
Upvote
17
(17
/
0)
And Broadcom isn't considering that VMware not moving to that model is why a lot of people stayed with VMware. It's completely irrelevant how long they held-off moving to that model when moving to that model is the problem, not the timing of it.
Upvote
26
(26
/
0)
Right... because the #1 complaint of VMware customers was that they had too many license keys. I can't wait for their new single license key to require online activation as well, because that went over so well the last time they did it.
Upvote
21
(21
/
0)
I've been using Nutanix for the last 7 or 8 years. I was hired by my current company just over 2 years ago to "migrate us off ESXi onto AHV". We are down to the last 3 very small ESXi clusters now. This due to vendor support for certain appliances. They've been told to support AHV or start walking. We'll be down to one very small ESXi cluster soon.
Nutanix (AHV) is not as mature as ESXi, but it simply works, and they've been very responsive to my feature requests and bug fixes.
--edit added (AHV)
Last edited:
Upvote
22
(22
/
0)
I love this expression so much! I'll be stealing it for future use.
Upvote
15
(15
/
0)
I have distinctly found this to be the opposite of your experience. They have always answered support tickets in less time than the negotiated support window. And very responsive to bug fixes and feature requests. Licensing costs for us are millions less than VMware. I'd change vendors if I were you.
We literally have thousands of VMs running across multiple clusters across multiple sites with just a small number of issues.
*I don't work for Nutanix, but I've been using their tech for the last 7 or 8 years, the first 4 or 5 with ESXi on Nutanix and the last 3 with Nutanix AHV.
Upvote
17
(17
/
0)
Indeed. I get better support from Reddit than I do for the paid support I got for ESXi.
Upvote
19
(19
/
0)
I'm in my 40's. I have been using VMWare, on and off, since I was a teenager. This whole debacle got me to try out virtualbox as my VMWare sub for this year was ending (but broadcom also killed workstation pro sooo). Network driver issues made me throw it in the bin. So, I fired up Hyper-V and you know what? I think broadcom did me a favour. I'm now saving £75 a year and I get the exact same performance as i did from VMware. Granted, Hyper-V's UI is garbage and accessing the VM's can be a pain but there are ways around it.
So thanks broadcom. you did me a huge favour. now go do one. you greedy, selfish.....................
So thanks broadcom. you did me a huge favour. now go do one. you greedy, selfish.....................
Upvote
23
(23
/
0)
One could. But most people don't. We're full on AHV at this point.
Upvote
6
(6
/
0)
Upvote
14
(17
/
-3)
Actually, by both the dictionary and also legal definitions all three very much are.
Every one of them controls at least one product or service (in some cases, entire markets) ... making them dictionary-definition monopolies.
It pisses people around here off every time their favorite corporate daddy is properly regulated, but every one of them have been subjected to monopoly-related regulatory actions in either the EU, US, or both .... historically and at this very moment. Which pretty well checks the legal definition.
Outcomes you hate still count.
Upvote
-10
(7
/
-17)
I was with you until your "Genocide Joe" nonsense, then you showed me who you are, and into the plonk file you go. But since you're wildly off topic anyway, let's address your nonsense.
Even if I bought your premise (I don't), and the U.S. immediately stopped all aid to Israel tomorrow -- are you honestly childishly simplistic enough to think that will somehow, magically, stop the war in Gaza?
Put another way, if Mexico's government (remember, Hamas is the legally elected government of Gaza) invaded a border town in Texas, murdered (and worse) 1200+ people, then took hundreds of hostages (including women (and we know what is being done to them in captivity) and children and elderly) back across the border -- do you honestly think the U.S. wouldn't lay waste to Mexico until every single one of those hostages was freed/accounted for? When the government of a state/nation/territory commits unprovoked acts of violence against another state/nation/territory -- that is an act of war.
Do you think the U.S. government would care one rip about whether or not Canada or the U.K. or Australia pulled any funding they might be sending if Mexico decided to murder 1200+ people in Texas and take hostages? Because if you do, I have a slightly used Baltimore bridge to sell you.
It's personal until the hostages are freed. Literally nothing is going to be able to stop the armed conflict until then, and Biden certainly isn't in control of that -- and Israel has plenty of other allies aside from the U.S.. Do I agree with everything Israel has done since they were attacked? No. Do I think they could have maybe tried harder to make peace with Gaza before they were attacked? Maybe. Does it matter now that they have been attacked, and had their people taken? Nope. Do I understand their rage? Absolutely.
Gaza is in the "find out" portion of the "fuck around" experiment. Don't want none, don't start none. It is as simple as that. Hamas could end this whole thing tomorrow by freeing the hostages and unconditionally surrendering. They clearly think they have more to gain by keeping the hostages, and continuing to fight (that, or they are suicidal). The government of Gaza demonstrably could not give less of a shit about their own people, whom they are using as human shields.
The problem with trying to somehow blame Biden for what is happening in Gaza with such a childish POV I can't even really argue with you, if that is the position you are taking. It is like arguing that pixie dust and happy thoughts will make one fly. Even if you got your way and somehow forced Biden to pull all aid to Israel, you will not have changed anything on the ground in Gaza. At all. Israel will continue until every single one of the hostages are freed/accounted for. The U.K., Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and every other armed country in the world would do the exact same thing in the same situation.
Please read some history books. These kinds of things have happened before in history. That's why Israel is reacting so strongly. They know what happens when appeasements are made to those who attack them without provocation. See also: Ukraine.
And, newsflash, if you think "Genocide Joe" is bad, watch and see how the world burns if El Trumpo gets back into power. The orange-one has already said he would be 100% fine if Russia "did whatever they wanted" with countries Trump doesn't like/doesn't think pay their "fair share." You think he is going to care what is happening in Gaza?
Please join the rest of us in reality. It kind of sucks, but at least you can affect the real world with your deeds and actions when you live in reality, instead of your news bubble echo chamber.
Upvote
-5
(19
/
-24)
Lol. They literally just got slammed by the EU for their iOS monopoly .... and they're about to get slammed again.
Their exclusively controlled market generated $1.1 trillion in 2022 ... with over 34 million independent developers who's livelihoods are subject to Apple's exclusive whim. That single Apple-controlled market is bigger than the GDP of all but 19 countries on the planet.
Give it a fucking rest.
Upvote
4
(16
/
-12)
The Republicans are already telling us what they'd do:
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/n...anitarian-aid-nagasaki-hiroshima/73156051007/
Upvote
28
(29
/
-1)